Swimming the Sacred River

I want to expand briefly on an idea from my last essay—the idea that science is the new occult. At one time, those we might now call occultists were those who were trying to explore the mysteries of nature. They wanted to discover that which was “hidden” (i.e. occult). For many of them, things like non-corporeal intelligences and super-terrestrial planes were not “supernatural”, but accepted explanations for natural processes. Those folks really wanted to know how things worked, and they did the best they could with the knowledge and technology they had on hand.

What used to be “occultists” are now called “scientists”. The essential shift happened with the humanistic discovery that gods and spirits are not necessary to explain the workings of the world. Similarly, the examination of humans moved away from souls and towards biology, sociology, and psychology. And as the scientific method improved, it was discovered that the universe was a vastly more complex and amazing place than any occultist could have predicted. And as science started peering into the very large, the very distant, and the very small, humans were truly exploring hidden domains utterly beyond the reach of normal modes of perception.

The world is a confusing place in many ways. It is a dangerous one, too. It makes perfect sense that the evolutionary process would promote curiosity and the ability to discover and understand—by learning about the workings of the world, our ability to survive and even dominate nature increased exponentially. Eventually, our curiosity led to the creation of science, a highly effective, if imperfect tool for figuring out what things are, what they do, and how they do it.

A popular refrain states that science cannot answer all questions. That is undoubtedly true. Embedded within the universe are processes and events that will be forever beyond our ability to analyze, predict, or understand.

The part of us that desires to know things seduces us into thinking that there is a deeper level of reality that can be grasped by a special tuning process of the mind. After all, the brain is the only real mediator of experience (and therefore of all knowledge), so it must be possible to manipulate that tool to perceive and grasp this hidden reality that sits beyond the keen eye of scientific examination. An extension of this perspective argues that some people in the past have indeed achieved this and developed translation systems that allow every day people to have access to this hidden wisdom—astrology, tarot, gematria, Cabala, goat entrails, tea leaves, entheogenic ritual, bibliomancy, augury, palmistry, scrying, Ouija, runecasting, and any other number of countless methods.

In her classic book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough writes:

As a religious naturalist I say “What Is, Is” with the same bowing of the head, the same bending of the knee. Which then allows me to say “Blessed Be To What Is” with thanksgiving. To give assent is to understand, incorporate, and then let go. With the letting go comes that deep sigh we call relief, and relief allows the joy-of-being-alive-at-all to come tumbling forth again.

Here Dr. Goodenough is briefly addressing a core existential challenge: to come to grips with reality. As one who looks to science as the primary instrument for understanding reality (or at least how it works), it can be daunting to accept that we humans (and myself in particular) have no real importance in the Grand Scheme of Things. The universe does not care about us. As absolutely amazing as life is, especially the emergence of self-awareness, life itself has no Ultimate Purpose. There is no Plan for us—there is absolutely nothing that we have to Learn or Accomplish, no preordained Destiny to fulfill.

Yes, acknowledging all that is a serious downer, no doubt about it. It very much goes counter to the human need to feel special, valuable, and safe.

Ursula Goodenough, one of the leading speakers in the Religious Naturalism movement, once pointed out that while the story of Nature can induce awe and wonder, the scientific knowledge of universal processes rarely inspires religious feelings. That is one reason why this spiritual movement isn’t “religious scientism”. It simply isn’t enough to think that Nature is great in and of itself—religion is, ultimately, about the human condition. Unless a spiritual movement appeals to one’s core existential concerns, it simply will not be of much use.

Goodenough also explains that religion answers two basic questions: How Things Are and What Is Important. I agree with her that the answer to the first question is, well, how things actually are. The single best method we’ve come up with to figure this out is the scientific method. This is not to say that there aren’t an infinity of questions—of course there are. Science will never have it all figured out; that is a very good thing, because otherwise things would become very boring. At the same time, I maintain that we can scratch a few things off the list: what we know about the physical origins of the Earth, the general process of evolution, the biopsychosocial basis of human functioning, geology, engineering, and astrophysics pretty much rules out 99% of religious theories regarding How Things Are. Moreover, the scientific method is far more effective in finding out new things that we never even knew we didn’t know.

What is divine? What things are sacred and what makes them so has been debated since the notion was invented. For many religions, even up to this day, sacredness has been seen as a kind of extension of a transcendent personality. In this general perspective, God, say, is inherently sacred (being God and all) and anything that God does, creates, or influences becomes itself holy. Of course, this orientation requires a dualism, where some things are sacred and some things are not. The not-sacred things/events/actions can range, depending on who you ask, from the blandly mundane to the wickedly profane, depending on those things’ relation with the source of sacredness.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

Stuart Kauffman, a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy, has a wonderful essay on emergence theology over at edge.org. In it, he outlines three essential views: theism, postmodernism, and (what I consider) religious naturalism. His argument is that emergence theory is superior to reductionistic views when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of the universe, and also provides a valid substrate upon which a modern ethical system can be developed.

To my mind, there is no such objective thing as essence, at least in the sense of a soul, genius, augoeides, higher self, or other non-corporeal form of self-being. In relation to this, I also do not recognize different spiritual states. By that, I mean that any experience of a “spiritual state” is a purely psychological phenomenon. This is not a bad thing at all; in fact, I am a big proponent of seeking such experiences. But they are purely subjective—no one is “more spiritual” than another person in any essential, objective sense.

There is a reason I put these two things together, spiritual states and essence. Religious transformations have not been shown to change the fundamental nature of people—such experiences can often change things like attitudes, aims, and beliefs, but not personal capabilities, bio-psycho functioning (with a caveat given below), or personality (a la the Big Five). Rather, such transformations often are aimed not at the biopsychosocial self but at one’s essential self, frequently in terms of being “born again,” “initiated,” or “attained.” The idea of attaining to objective spiritual states is an ancient one, although it takes a good number of forms, depending on the model one is working within. It’s useful to remember that those models are all manmade.

To our knowledge, humans are unique in that we have intentionality. We possess both self-awareness and the ability to make choices within a range of action possibilities. It is a gift of the most recent addition to our big brains, the neocortex, the outer rind of neurons that, among other things, allows for judgment, reasoning, and language. We take all this for granted, of course, but it is truly astounding—math, art, science, music, architecture, poetry, engineering, sports—these are all unique to homo sapiens.

Religion

Another major product of our neocortex is religion. It is arguable that religion was really just the earliest form of natural science, using available data and human reason to explain and predict various phenomena, such as seasonal changes or various illnesses. It has been a long strange trip from that point to modern religion. Although some religious movements still try to explain the physical world (such as the many Christians who use the Bible to determine the age of the Earth), most have moved into the more abstract domains, such as morality, transcendence, and the afterlife.

While my posts thus far have focused on a philosophical framework for spirituality, it is important to understand that such constructs are not the meat of a religious life. Ultimately, what makes a path spiritual or religious is the experience of it as such. As Jennifer Dornan (2004) writes, “the symbols and abstract ideas of a religion do not have the social force of belief unless there is some performative, experiential aspect to provide meaning and import to those symbols.” At the same time, such experiences have little intrinsic meaning until interpreted in the light of some established philosophy or ideology, and this dynamic dance is the engine behind the countless number of religious systems in the world. With this in mind, let’s begin to explore the world of religious experience.